Sound Waveform Display - Blender addon

Most of the time in animation, you have to sync actions with sound,

Seeing an audio waveform is nice to immediately get visual hints without having to permanently scrub audio.
In Blender, you can natively open a sequencer and show waveform on strips. But that takes screen space and time to set-up.

Here is a solution to get the sound waveform inside animation editor!

Main control

On : Enable or refresh
Off : Disable
Height offset : Allow to manually tweak the peak heights (sometimes it might display too small or too high)

Options detail

There are several options to select sounds show waveform.

Source:

• All
• Sequencer only (default).
• Speaker only

If sequencer source is used, more options are available:

• Selected Strips : Display only selected strips in sequencer (even muted ones)
• Sound In List : Display only sound from listed sequencer strip within panel (list even muted ones)
• Audible Strips : Display all audible strips in sequencer
• Scene Range : Display sequencer audio only on scene range (not preview range)

Preferences

In the preferences, you have come customizable settings:

• Waveform color : Customize color as you like (note: too dark values might fail and use white instead)
• Waveform details : Details (as resolution) of the generated wave image
  choose between Blocky, Very Low, Low, Medium (default), High
  The waveform aspect will be more detailed, as you go up but will take more time to generate and take more memory.
• Verbose : prints status and commands in console (for debugging purposes).
  

Notes

This addon require FFmpeg. Simple steps are described directly in addon preferences about how to optain it if you don't have it in your system path.
(With a method to download and install automatically.)

Troubleshoot

Permission denied

If you have an error popup stating "permission denied Error" in the last lines, it means ffmpeg binary do not have permission to execute.

You need to add execution rights:

Right-click on the file > Properties > Find the permission category and check allow execution.

If you're on Mac or Linux you can also copy the full path to the ffmpeg bin, open a terminal and use the following command:

To animate in sync, listen to your eyes !

Samuel Bernou

Tags : #blender #animation #sound #sync #blender-addon #b3d #b2d